The AI talent wars are raging on.
Two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to poach leading AI researcher Noam Shazeer and part of his team at Character.AI, Shazeer is leaving the company to join OpenAI.
Shazeer worked at Google as the vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, where he was credited for helping close the gap between the capabilities of Gemini and ChatGPT.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer said in an X post.
“It was a difficult decision to move on,” he added. “I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.”
Shazeer was an early employee at Google in 2000. In 2017, he co-authored the research paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” which laid the foundation for the transformer architecture powering today’s AI boom and almost all large language models (LLMs).
In 2021, Shazeer left Google and co-founded the companion chatbot startup, Character.AI. When he departed, he critiqued Google for exercising too much caution when it came to releasing new products based on transformer-based LLMs. During its 2023 Series A funding round, Character.AI was valued at $1 billion.
In recent years, Character.AI has been mired in litigation. This past January, nearly two years after Shazeer returned to Google in 2024, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle multiple lawsuits over teen suicides and mental health harms.
Shazeer’s high-profile moves reflect how AI labs are in an expensive and speedy competition to attract top talent. Last year, Meta poached several OpenAI staffers. OpenAI has poached enterprise sales and go-to-market talent from companies including Slack, Salesforce, and Snowflake. Last year, Microsoft hired two dozen engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind.
As one could imagine, the poaching wars and aqui-hiring come at a high price.
Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta tried to lure OpenAI staffers with $100 million signing bonuses. And aside from the $2.7 billion licensing deal Google struck with Shazeer, the company also struck a licensing and talent deal with the AI coding startup Windsurf. For $2.4 billion, Google DeepMind hired CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, and Google licensed certain Windsurf technology.
Shazeer’s move to OpenAI comes ahead of the company’s anticipated IPO. While the company has filed a confidential S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it stated that there is no decisive timeline for when it would go public.
In a statement to Reuters, which broke the news, Google said: “We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years.”